[libvirt] Intend to add OVA installation API

[Ata E Husain Bohra]

-----Original Message----- 
From: Raghunatha Reddy
Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2012 1:53 AM
To: libvir-list at redhat.com
Subject: Re: [libvirt] Intend to add OVA installation API



Ata Bohra <ata.husain <at> hotmail.com> writes:

>
>
> Thanks again Doug. With this direction, I have  started looking into
details of both formats and also to convert OVF -> libvirt domain XML 
format.
Will post the review once I get a satisfactory code to share with the 
community.
Appreciate your support/suggestion. Thanks!Ata > Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2012
17:27:03 -0500> Subject: Re: [libvirt] Intend to add OVA installation API> 
From:
cardoe <at> cardoe.com> To: ata.husain <at> hotmail.com> CC: libvir-list 
<at>
redhat.com> > On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 5:05 PM, Ata Bohra <ata.husain <at>
hotmail.com> wrote:> > Thanks Doug for your suggestions.> >> > I believe you 
are
correct about the relation between OVA and OVF. But I am> > not 100 % 
possitive
about your suggestion: "defining an appropriate domain> > in libvirt". To
understand better I am sharing more details about my plans:> >> > 1. Enhance
libvirt interface code (libvirt.c) to provide a> > domain-independent 
routine:
virDomainCreateOVA, an alternate API to create> > domain.> >     To make 
client
code real simple, this routine can take ova path as input> > and internally
strip the OVA to extract required details. (planning to> > define a struct 
to
hold all essential> >     information).> > 2. Second, to enhance ESX driver 
to
perform ESX specfic calls.> >> > Given OVA is a tar file, the parsing is 
just
another file open/read> > operation; it would be simple to perform it inside
domain_conf.c (infact I> > have written a parser to strip information off 
OVA
already).> >> > Hope to get some comments/suggestions on above steps.> >> >
Thanks!> > Ata> > Right. I'm suggesting you don't go that route and approach 
the
problem> from another angle. I did a little Googling since my last e-mail to 
at>
least make sure I understood the basics. So an OVF looks like the> 
following:> >
virtualappliance/package.ovf> virtualappliance/disk1.vmdk>
virtualappliance/disk2.vmdk> virtualappliance/cdrom.iso>
virtualappliance/en-US-resources.xml> > An OVA would simply be a tar of the
above and named> virtualappliance.ova package.ovf is an XML file containing 
the>
description of the hardware of the virtual machine, much like the XML> that
libvirt stores about domains. While en-US-resources.xml would be> the US 
English
descriptions of the machine and its hardware.> > I'm suggesting you write an
application that transforms package.ovf> into libvirt's own domain XML 
format
and simply call> virDomainDefineXML() rather than adding API to libvirt 
itself.
You> could then further extend the application to allow you to take a> 
libvirt
domain and export it as a OVA.> > Looking at VMWare and Xen, they both treat
OVA/OVF as a foreign format> and require a converter application to import 
them
to their native> internals so it wouldn't be much different than their
approach.> > Just my 2 cents.> -- > Doug Goldstein
>

Hi Ata Bohra,
   I am very happy to see this mail chain on OVF to libvirt xml conversion. 
I
appreciate your efforts on this. Even we are looking to have this kind of
conversion utility. Could you please share if you have more details on this?

Thanks in advance.

Best Regards
Raghu

Hi Raghu,

As mentioned in the mail above, I am currently stuck at "transferring disk 
to ESX". OVAs store the vmdks in "stream optimized" fashion and sweeping 
over vSphere documentation I could not find any API to uncompress the disk 
after transferring it to ESX. Recently Matthias appended libvirt with the 
support to upload volumes but for installing OVA I am not sure that will be 
useful.

Lastly, I posted request to allow addition of public API to install OVA to 
libvirt layer; response is still awaited. If that's permissible, rolling out 
the code to install OVA on ESX should not take long.

Hope, I was able to reply to your query.

Thanks!
Ata

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